‘The forming of the senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.’¹

– K. Marx, 1974

 

‘In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having.’²

– K. Marx, 1974

 

‘These then, and such as these, are the features of a democracy, an agreeable form of anarchy with plenty of variety and an equality of peculiar kind for equals and unequals alike.’³

– Plato, 1941

 

IT could be said that peace was not an issue for Gandhi. Nor was reconciliation, for that matter, to be achieved at the cost of truth, non-violence and swaraj/self-governance. That is a matter that the modern state worries about both internally and externally. Gandhi was a disrupter of peace, a dissenter who never took injustice lying down. More importantly, on the other hand, one may argue that he alone, amongst those engaged with peace endeavours, post-Enlightenment, worked with a science of peace: It was not a matter of policy or enforcement by the state but that of the very presuppositions on which a society and its institutions of science religion and politics rested. His ‘experiments with truth’ involved a consistent testing of the law of non-violence in science, economics, religion and politics. Even truth was not a given. It had to be experimented with and articulated each time in keeping with conscience, context, circumstance and preparation.

This is a challenge to the modern nation state which is founded on the presupposition that human nature is in principle disposed to violence and conflict rather than to non-violence. In fact, the problem of peace, or for that matter non-violence, in post-Enlightenment thought, is more an epistemological problem than an ethical one.

Kant’s essay on ‘Perpetual Peace’ written in 1796, considered a classic in Peace and Reconciliation studies, sets the record straight in this matter.⁴ Following Hobbes’ theory of human nature, in the supplement to the main body of his text, which is essentially a policy document, he cannot resist revealing the epistemological plot underlying the modern nation state and its aspirations for peace. Peace, he argues, is not a consequence of any moral condition of man. It is an end, an ‘idea’ prompted or ‘prescribed’ to us by reason, quite contrary to the self-seeking natural propensities of man, which are towards war/violence. He argues further, that reason must use the natural propensities of man (towards war) to work in its favour, to impress upon man that it is his duty to follow peace. Thus peace is and can be advocated in practice only as a matter of expedience of the state.

 

This conflict between reason and the self-seeking natural propensities of man (in other words, experience/practice), which Kant accepts as a given, forms the bedrock of the epistemological presuppositions of mainstream post-Enlightenment thought and the modern nation state. It establishes the autonomy of reason, its separation and conflict with experience and volition, and rejects the human faculty of reflection as being indicative of anything beyond that which distinguishes and compares the objects of reason with those of experience.⁵ The conditions for experiments in peace do not exist. Only conditions for the universal norms of reason must be sustained and conformed to.

Ironically and paradoxically then, it is these natural propensities for war that come to be embodied in the fundamental natural rights to self-preservation, property and freedom that form the basis of modern political theory and institutions of the modern nation state and society. The state comes into being to enforce peace and to simultaneously enshrine the rights to self-preservation, property and liberty, articulations of the human propensity for war, as fundamental, natural, inalienable and universal human rights. Reason applies itself to establish institutions of state and society for the maintenance of peace in the service of the perpetuation and establishment of these human rights in science, religion and politics.

 

There is a hitch, however. This promise of peace by the state involves, crucially, the necessary surrender of an individual’s and society’s capacity for self-governance, if there is such a thing at all within this framework. In exchange for securing these rights in a peaceful manner, citizens must conform to the law of the state. This, of course, is in the service of internal peace, i.e. peace within the state, while simultaneously every citizen is required to contribute to the state’s readiness for war with other states at all times. Defence of the sovereignty and territorial boundaries of the state are a necessary condition for the existence of the state.

Institutions of the state are in combat readiness both internally, vis-a-vis the citizen, and externally, vis-a-vis other states, to defend and impose its sovereignty. The citizen is in his/her turn, as it were, in combat readiness to defend the inalienable rights that establish the territorial boundaries of his or her existence. In this way, the reconciliation between reason and natural human propensities for war is forged so that they become co-conspirators in the cause of peace, or should one say ‘war’?

In effect then, the modern nation state legislates for peace as a means to war. Kant, therefore, concludes: ‘A good political constitution, however, is not to be expected as a result of progress in morality; but rather, conversely, the good moral condition of a nation is to be looked for, as one of the first fruits of such a constitution. Hence the mechanism of nature, working through the self-seeking propensities of man (which of course counteract one another in their external effects), may be used by reason as a means of making way for the realisation of her own purpose, the empire of right (emphasis mine), and, as far as is in the power of the state, to promote and secure in this way internal as well as external peace.’⁶

 

It is no surprise then that Porter (2015) notes that today 95% of wars are civil wars.⁷ They involve wars between rebels and the state or between opposing ethnic and religious groups. The reasons for this follow almost flawlessly from the paradox, of reason and inalienable rights, that forms the foundation of the modern nation state. As a consequence of the necessary surrender of self-governance for security and peace, dissent is not merely suspect but a criminal act under the law of the modern nation state. All pretensions of ‘deliberative democracy’ evaporate as soon as the state is challenged with the possibility of self-governance, whether individual or communitarian, economic, political or social.

Gandhi’s assertion that dissent is ‘civil disobedience’ was believable only as long as we were citizens of an Empire which India could secede from and confront with the possibility of the sovereignty and power of civil society, built on presuppositions of non-violence and truth, i.e. as long as it opposed the very presuppositions of the modern nation state. Against all strategies of solidarity that would aid the effort to oppose the colonizer, it was therefore important to focus as much on self-reform – removal of untouchability, prohibition, Hindu-Muslim unity, education, and most importantly, the charkha – to re-instate the principles of self-governance and non-violent dissent in civil society. This was what Gandhi called the constructive programme.

 

This was to address not merely colonialism and post-colonialism, with which academia have been so disproportionately and mistakenly engaged, post-independence, but it would also address the real problem – modernity and the very foundations of the modern nation state. The point one is trying to make is that self-governance or Gandhi’s swaraj, which involved the sovereignty of the individual and civil society as against the state, was not only a problem of colonized India but of the very foundations of the modern nation state and the underlying dominant epistemology of post-Enlightenment thought.

As soon as we established the independent Indian state following precisely the structure and foundations of the modern nation state, that last bastion, of the possibility of demonstrating the power of civil society over that of the state, crumbled. Our very existence, as individual and citizen, depends again on combat readiness versus state and neighbour.

 

The second consequence of the rejection of the faculty of reflection that enables self-governance, and the consequent establishment of the regime of reason, rights and the state is, therefore, far more fundamental and with far-reaching consequences: conscience, habit and custom, which are the foundations of a society’s specific and unique institutions of self-governance (swaraj) and its response to the possibility of constituting social and political institutions conducive to non-violence and truth or peace, come under question. The hegemony of reason fortified by a theory of fundamental, universal and inalienable human rights, imposes itself as the norm for all societies, if they are to be counted as civilized at all.⁸ As Oakeshott, in his classic essay ‘Rationalism in Politics’ points out, however, the rationalist is truly out of depth with society:

‘Like a foreigner or a man out of his social class, he is bewildered by a tradition and a habit of behaviour of which he knows only the surface; a butler or an observant house-maid has the advantage of him. And he conceives a contempt for what he does not understand; habit and custom appear bad in themselves, a kind of nescience of behaviour. And by some strange self-deception, he attributes to tradition (which of course is pre-eminently fluid), a rigidity and fixity of character that belongs to ideological politics.’⁹

Gandhi too considers this autonomy given to reason as misplaced: ‘Attribution of omnipotence to Reason is as bad a piece of idolatry as is worship of stock and stone believing it to be God... I plead not for the suppression of Reason, but for a due recognition of that in us which sanctifies reason itself.’¹⁰

 

Both Oakeshott and Gandhi draw attention to the fact that ideological politics and the politics of reason have surprisingly a lot in common. Both are equally hegemonic and ‘idolatrous’ and both consider the voice of conscience, habit and custom, which are the truly independent guides of civil society, a threat to their existence.

It is perhaps not surprising then that the three bones of contention that stand out as the main causes for a disruption of peace in recent times arise from an emphasis of rationality as a norm, a heightened awareness of one’s rights and an increased aggressiveness in the demand to acquire them, combined with a contempt for anything that is seen to represent custom or tradition.¹¹ In sum, the individual in the nation state is edgy, compelled by the wisdom of Enlightenment Reason to denounce custom as stagnant tradition and bound to embrace every insistence on rights as a sign of change and progress.

The cost of peace with reason at the helm, involves not only the thwarting of all dissent but the suppression of all reform from within, all plurality of voice and conscience. What is left is not just the hegemony of the state but, more importantly, a monolithic rationality with the vision of a caricaturized civil society resounding with the din of political correctness in the midst of a violent war fought by the self-proclaimed angels of rationality and the equally self-proclaimed defenders of the faith. Self-governance being the casualty in the modern nation state, the attack of the rationalists, the backlash of the ideological traditionalists and the increasing demand on a secular state and law to intervene leaves one with the question as to what it is to be human, in the final analysis.

 

As we have argued so far, the foundations of the modern nation state constituted on the paradoxical relationship between reason and the inalienable natural rights of man are a ready recipe for violence, where legislation for peace exists only as a means to war. The individual as a citizen possessed of and armed with rights is enshrined in modern consciousness and constitutions of state as fundamental to human freedom and life, to being human itself. Each one of the natural inalienable rights presumes ownership/possession: the right to self-preservation, of the body, the right to property, of labour, and the right to liberty, of the faculty of reason and enterprise. What follow from these presumptions are conceptions of the good life, equality and distributive justice, progress and above all the norms of rationality and consensus and systems of classification monitored by ‘experts’ in response to which state policy is formulated and social aspirations are formed.

 

The contentious nature of this relation, i.e. of ‘ownership’, however, has been overlooked by the modern nation state, despite questions having been raised most powerfully by Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts and equally by Gandhi. Their points of view challenge the very foundations of the modern nation state, the theory of rights as being an inalienable part of man’s nature and the institutions of democracy that follow from them. They argue that the very idea of ownership, or possession is a sign of the alienation of the being of man from body, body-politic and the cosmos – the opposition of ‘what you have’ and are, as opposed to ‘who you are’. The sense of possession or ‘having’ acts, in fact, as an obstacle to the realization of what is truly human.

According to Marx, property, or the sense of possession/having, isolates the individual and abstracts him from society and the world. It is, therefore, a perversion and poverty of the five senses of man. Marx’s contention is that the need to possess or ‘have’ is a sign of the alienation of man from his own nature, of man from man and of man from nature/the world. To ‘possess’ one’s body, Marx argues, is the basis of the commodification of human labour, the alienation of one’s body from oneself and its enslavement to another under capitalism, which sustains the modern nation state. It is an indeterminate, generalized labour, stripped of its individuality that constitutes capital. It enslaves the human being rather than frees him, of course, again in the name of the rights of free enterprise and rationality!

 

On the other hand, the cultivation of the five senses of the body and therefore, the skilling of the body, make it possible for the individual to experience the world in all its richness, not in isolation/abstraction but as a social being. Thus, for Marx: ‘...so established society produces man in this entire richness of his being – produces the rich man profoundly endowed with all the senses – as its enduring reality.’¹²

Gandhi pushes the argument further by seeing that in the ultimate analysis, man’s last possession is his body itself. Therefore the final test of man’s cultivation of the senses through the five vows of self-governance – truth, non-violence, non-stealing, non-possession and brahmacharya, lies in the ability to give up the body, to be prepared to die in the service of the other. This in his view would be perfect non-possession, which he would argue would be perfect non-violence, and perfect brahmacharya as well: ‘Love and exclusive possession can never go together. Theoretically, when there is perfect love, there must be perfect non-possession. The body is our last possession. So, a man can only exercise perfect love and be completely dispossessed, if he is prepared to embrace death and renounce his body for the sake of human service.’¹³

He recognizes, however, that perfect non-possession is an impossibility. In a sense then, trusteeship rests on the paradox that ‘having’ everything, one does not consider it one’s own. One holds what one possesses in trust for the service and welfare of all.¹⁴ Thus, in the place of the commodification of labour (capitalism) and acquisition of rights, of self preservation, property and liberty (democracy) presupposed in the modern nation state, the law of bread labour, service, trusteeship and non-possession, prevail in a non-violent society.

 

The cultivated body and therefore bread labour as necessary scrifice for the sustenance of body, body politic and cosmos constitute the human frontier between reason and the world and therefore bear witness to the relation between them. They constitute the fundamental epistemological and ontological counter to the dualism of reason and experience or reason and the natural propensities of man. It is the ‘cultivated’ body, that is the measure of the truth of the relation between reason and the world, its ability to sustain itself only to serve another and save itself only to the extent that the other (God, man or nature) is served. It is not an accident then that both Gandhi and Marx locate the heart of the problem of their dualism in modern times in the absence of a theory of the cultivation of the senses and a skilling of the body. What Marx calls subsistence labour, Gandhi refers to as bread labour. Both argue against the ‘ownership’ of the body and for the cultivation of the senses and for the ‘skilled’ or ‘useful, intelligent’ labour, which are the signs of self-governance of man in relation to himself and to the other, whether in relation to man or nature, and in the case of Gandhi, God.

For Marx this constitutes the socialist man: ‘But since for the socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labour, nothing but the emergence of nature for man, so he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his genesis.’¹⁵

 

The law of bread labour critically challenges the presuppositions of possession that underlie the theory of rights and therefore is central to Gandhi’s Constructive Programme. According to Gandhi the law of bread labour states simply, that to live (and to let live) each must perform useful bodily labour. This expresses an undeniable universal truth and reality of human existence. It is the necessary sacrifice that each must perform to live.

A recognition of the law of bread labour as a law of human existence establishes a principle of equality amongst human beings, not from a point of view of rights and anarchy but as an acknowledgement of the truth that each must perform bodily labour to live. Further, unlike the privileging of intellectual labour, freedom of choice, enterprise and reason, and their use in the legitimation of the right to private property, i.e. as a source of power over man and nature, in the modern nation state, the law of bread labour compels the realization that those who serve through intellectual labour necessarily survive on the charity of society, on the bread labour of others. Brahmins of yore up to the 19th century, the monastic traditions of Jainism and Buddhism and the Deobandi traditions, recognized and followed this principle and perhaps, some do even now.

This principle follows neither the way of power and arrogance of the intellectual-expert-technocrat nexus nor of the victimology of the left. The self-awareness of one’s mode of service, one’s office and calling, is an assertion of one’s being and is therefore a position of true freedom and power. No matter how weak the position and lowly the service may appear, the self-acknowledgement of one’s service as an office is affirmation of one’s being and never succumbs to victimhood vis-a-vis any group, caste, class or authority, however powerful. This is a point of view that neither the orthodoxy of tradition nor the rights ridden liberal can understand or tolerate. For them, status must be acquired and possessed, conferred but not self-determined or self-governed.

 

So when Sanjukta Panigrahi, the prima donna of Odissi dance asked permission to be a ‘devadasi’ and perform ‘service’ through her dance, at the Jagannath Puri temple, where the dance had originated, the priests baulked at her request and the reason and rights ridden liberal were shocked and affronted by such a ‘degrading’ demand. Sanjukta Panigrahi’s quiet yet powerful response was that she believed ‘devadasi’ (meaning servant of God), was a good word. The fundamental difference here is that she saw her ‘right’ not as one of acquiring the freedom of temple entry but as an affirmation of her being and office to serve society and God in her capacity as a woman and a dancer.

Contrary to the inalienable and universal natural rights of self-preservation, property and liberty that are the foundation of the modern nation state and equality that forms the ruling principle of democracy then, it is the recognition of one’s unique ability/calling in a system of mutual service, bread labour and self-governance that are the foundational principles of institutions in a non-violent society, i.e. of a civil society truly independent of the state, its norms and methods. The very structure and institutions of society based on the law of bread labour are fundamentally different and necessary to establish peace, both internally and externally: ‘Obedience to the law of bread labour will bring about a silent revolution in the structure of society. Man’s triumph will consist in substituting the struggle of existence by the struggle for mutual service. The law of the brute will be replaced by the law of man.’¹⁶

 

This is the basis of Gandhi’s constructive programme – to which he assigned the office of dissent and civil disobedience against the structures of modern civilization, as much as he saw it as necessary to substantive peace in the world.¹⁷ Any initiative for peace without a constructive programme is bound to remain at the level of policy and pacts in and between states that are waiting to be broken. It is the constructive programme, however, that is the missing link in all peace initiatives today. As Gandhi argues, he knows no other substitute for establishing a non-violent society and state. It presents the possibility of experiments in the non-violence of political economy and therefore of institutions of service and sacrifice rather than of self-preservation and possession in society.

The insistence on the constructive programme calls into question the view in modern political theory that issues of a state’s external peace are independent of those of internal peace. It argues instead that the external state of affairs is a reflection of man’s relation with himself, and with the other whether it be body, body politic or the cosmos and for that very reason perfect non-violence and peace in the individual, the village and the nation alone have the potency to not only fight imperialism and hegemonies of science, technology and rationality but also to forge peace amongst nations of the world.

 

Imperialism before, and globalization today, are led by the spirit of acquisition fortified by a theory of universal inalienable natural rights of self-preservation, property and freedom. They legitimize the sovereign jurisdiction of the state over territory, its acquisition, expansion, exploitation and defence. This is, however, only the elementary, tangible form of acquisition which precedes the imposition of universal reason and natural rights, instrumental to its ‘perpetuation’, that engender acquisition of the body and soul of civil society and the rejction of its specific cultures of conscience, custom and self-governance.

The modern consciousness is thus constitutive of, and constituted by, institutions of the nation state that compel, nay, enforce radical transformations of social, religious, political, scientific, technological and economic institutions seen as fundamental to the democratic process. In other words, the very edifice on which we stand today defies peace. We must have to start all over again.

We are so blinded, however, by the context of the modern nation state and the point of view of liberalism where the right to property is a given, that we fail to comprehend the possibility of alternative terms of discourse. Therefore, it is not Orientalism but an epistemological handicap that holds sway on the best of Sanskritists when they translate the first paragraph of the Arthashastra, as defining the purpose of the Science of Politics as the ‘acquisition and protection of the earth’,¹⁸ thus easily assimilating it into modern theories of the nation state, not only distancing us from our intellectual legacies but also preventing any alternative discourse or counter to the dominant discourse of modernity.

 

Looked at from a Gandhian or Marxist perspective, as discussed above, however, the key Sanskrit terms referred to in the specific definition are ‘lâbhe’ and ‘pâlane’, respectively, translate as the science for the ‘benefit’ and ‘nurture’ of the earth, rather than of ‘acquisition’ or ‘expansion’ and ‘protection’ (which would more correctly translate into the Sanskrit terms of vitta and raksha). In fact, the Arthashastra stipulates that a study of the cultivation of the five senses itself constitutes the science of politics.¹⁹ The very first Book of the Arthashastra has two chapters on the cultivation of the senses as part of the training of the king. It is considered so crucial to the training of a king or to statecraft that according to the Arthashastra, an ‘uncultivated’ king will not survive however powerful he may be.

One other point, lest it goes unnoticed. The text talks of the king’s duty to nurture and do what is beneficial for the earth (prithvi). This is no accident or exaggerated sense of the possible extent of a king’s kingdom. The idea is that while his kingdom may only be a part of the earth, his responsibility is to the earth as a whole. This binds him to therefore not think of the nurture and benefit of his kingdom in isolation from that of the rest of earth. In fact, therefore, the cultivated king exerts his authority over all of earth.²⁰

The principle of rule and self-governance of a human being and civil society, and therefore of the state, is neither covetousness and power, nor is it a renunciation of wealth and power. It is sacrifice. Sacrifice, by definition, is the service by the part in the interest of the whole, in the acute self-realization (i.e., not enforced by another), that the good of the individual is contained in the good of all. Thus when, Yudhisthira, citing his knowledge of the scriptures, argues that his salvation lay in renouncing the kingdom and heading off to the forest, the great sage Devasthana says to him: ‘The Supreme Ordainer created wealth for sacrifice, and He created man also for taking care of that wealth and for performing sacrifice. For this reason, the whole of one’s wealth should be applied to sacrifice. Pleasure would follow from it, as a natural consequence.’²¹

And, so would peace follow. Perhaps then, it would be more feasible to start with considering the possibility of a legal right to bread labour and to trusteeship. This, not only as a law within the nation state but a necessary condition of international law as well – that each state can and must act only as trustee of its territorial resources, human and otherwise. Thus the role of the state with respect to territory is not for acquisition and protection/ defence, and definitely not exploitation, as much as to attend to its nurture and that which is beneficial to the earth – its ‘cultivation’, as much as for the cultivation of the senses that inform the human being. For this, the law of bread labour and the cultivation of the senses, in all their sensual, gender specific, regional, cultural and historical variations, and ‘experiments with truth’, in place of a universal imposition of reason and rights, would become necessary.

 

Footnotes:

1. K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (M. Milligan trans.). Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1974, p. 96)

2. Ibid., p. 94.

3. Plato, The Republic (F.M. Cornford trans.). Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1941, p. 277.

4. I. Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, in Kant: Political Writings (M.C. Smith trans.). George Allen & Unwin, London, 1903.

5. For Kant then, as it is for Hobbes, the natural propensities of man are what constitute his true nature. Thus Kant in an appendix to his Critique of Pure Reason (N.K. Smith trans. Macmillan, London, 1933), attacks Leibniz’s understanding of reflection calling it an ‘amphiboly’ of the concept based on ‘intellectualized appearances’. For Leibniz on the other hand, it is ‘acts of reflection, which make us think of what is called the self, and consider that this or that is within us.’ Monadology, 30, p. 8. (G.W. Leibniz, Philosophical Writings. M. Morris, selected and trans. J.M. Dent & Sons, London, 1934).

6. I. Kant, 1903, op. cit., p.154.

7. E. Porter, Connecting Peace, Justice, and Reconciliation. Lynne Reinner, Boulder, 2015.

8. A. Srinivasan, in a powerfully argued paper, cites how the regime of reason and the modern nation state enforced reform on the devadasi system of Tamil Nadu and the Nairs of Kerala under colonial rule, holding up ‘a westen, conjugal, monogamous ideal’ of marriage as the progressive norm and right for women as a way out of indigenous tradition bound customs. She shows how these instances, looked at from a Gandhian ‘science of swaraj’ point of view, demonstrate ‘the self-conscious variety and heterogeneity of the Indian tradition’ in its understanding of the different substantive articulations of self-governance as regards women. See A. Srinivasan, ‘Women and Reform of Indian Tradition: Gandhian Alternative to Liberalism’, Economic and Political Weekly 22(51), 19 December 1987, pp. 2225-2228.

9. M. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. Methuen and Co, London, p. 31.

10. Young India 14-10-1926, from M.K. Gandhi, Voice of Truth. S. Narayan (ed.), Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad, 1969, p. 106.

11. The rationalist provocations and retaliatory killings of the provocateurs, protests against the santhara ritual death of a 13 year old girl, the feminist protests demanding rights of entry into Shani Shingnapur temple and Sabarimala are examples of the clash of reason and custom. The point one is trying to make is that this is not a matter of taking sides but, as argued above, the modern regime of the dualism of reason and experience breeds an incomprehension of the possibility of other forms of rationality, other cosmologies and fosters a preconceived notion of the stagnant irrationality of tradition. Therefore, the approach is not one of reform but of intellectual arrogance and aggression arising from the desire to impose a modern regime of reason and rights.

12. K. Marx, 1974, op. cit., p. 96.

13. M.K. Gandhi, Economic and Industrial Life and Relations (Vol. I), V.B. Kher (ed.). Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad, 1957, p. 160.

14. M.K. Gandhi, My Theory of Trusteeship (No. 18). Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay; Gandhi Peace Foundation, New Delhi, 1970.

15. K. Marx, 1974, op. cit., p. 100.

16. M.K. Gandhi, 1957, op. cit., p. 98.

17. M.K. Gandhi, Constructive Programme. Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad, 1941.

18. Arthashastra, 1.1.1 ‘Prithvyaa laabhe paalane cha’, in R.P. Kangle (trans.), The Kautilya Arthashastra (Part II). Motilal Banarasidas, Delhi, 1972.

19. Arthashastra, 1.6.3, ‘Krishnam hi shastram’, in R.P. Kangle (trans.), The Kautilya Arthashastra (Part II). Motilal Banarasidas, Delhi, 1972.

20. Arthashastra, 6.1.18 (Kangle, 1972): ‘But one possessed of personal qualities, though ruling over a small territory, being united with excellences of the constituent elements, (and) conversant with (the science of) politics, does conquer the entire earth, never loses.’

21. K.M. Ganguli (trans.), The Mahabharata (Vol. III), Shantiparva. Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, Delhi, 2010, p. 37.